Sunday, August 14, 2011

Heathrow runway alternation in Google Calendar

I moved to London recently, and unfortunately I found out too late that my new flat is right in the flight path of Heathrow's northern runway, causing quite a bit of overhead noise. However, I noticed that some periods were very quiet (including when I was viewing the flat). Was there some method to this madness?

Turns out, there is. The Heathrow runway alternation schedule is nicely documented on the Heathrow website. Basically: one week has noisy mornings, the next week has noisy afternoons/evenings.

But it's a PDF file, which is only useful for printing and sticking on walls, which is sooooo 2010. So I turned it into a public Google Calendar, for use by myself and anyone else who might be interested. But alas, Google removed the ability to search for public calendars back in 2009, which forces me to post about it here to make it findable.

Here's the ID of this calendar:r1846kc94hj3ekk24ueb69151g@group.calendar.google.com
Copy this, head over to Google Calendar, and paste it into the box labelled “Add a friend’s calendar”. Simple as that.

That's only for the northern runway, known as 27R (when landing/departing towards the west) or 09L (when landing/departing towards the east). Since landing and departing probably make the same amount of noise, I lumped them all together. If anyone would like a similar thing for the southern runway, let me know and I'll put one together.

About Me

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Taekwindow

Taekwindow is a small and light Windows program that I wrote. It enables you to move windows by Alt-dragging anywhere in their interior, and resizing by Alt-right-dragging, just like in many X window managers.